Goodbye #13!
Don’t do it.
I have to.
My advice as your literary agent is that one more bus blog will pigeonhole you to the point that no one will look at your stuff except Urban Transport Quarterly.
This is not about buses! It is about canceled memory and the pain of loss. It just happens that what was lost is a bus line. Forty years ago a writing teacher told our class, “Write what you know!” I know buses.
Suit yourself. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
***
Goodbye #13!
I dismissed the rumors. Because light rail construction was underway, some bus line routes would be modified: the 34, the 14, the 18. But I knew what they were saying about the 13 Bus just could just not be true.
Until I saw the sign at the local bus stop:
Mevutal, oblivion! like our future vows in Kol Nidre: betelin umevutalin, eradicated and nullified, may they not exist anymore!
For me Bus 13 recalled many memories, some all the way back to our first days of Aliyah. We were new. We were lost. We didn’t know where we were or where anything was. We had never heard of Moovit. Our ulpan was in Talpiot, which to us could have been on the other side of the moon. People said the 13 Bus would take us there.
The 13 stopped on Palmach Street, around the corner from where we lived. We waited for it on a bench in front of one of the two competing hardware stores.
Whoever designed the Bus 13 route must have been a getaway driver for bank robbers, the kind who who truss up and blindfold the bank manager and stuff him in the back seat, then zigzag around so he can’t tell where they are taking him.
First we made a sharp left. Then we made a right and drove a bit. Then we turned left and headed down a hill, angling to the right. Then we reached a traffic circle and turned left. Then we turned right and made many stops, all named for streets we had never heard of: Ben Yo’ezer, Antigonos. It was like driving through Pirkei Avot.
A bit later we came to a bridge. We had a lot of time to look around there, because we were behind a long line of cars trying to turn left. To our right over the bridge was a building with a gray dome, as if the owner wanted his home to look like the Al-Aqsa mosque. Or maybe it was the Al-Aqsa mosque. It didn’t look like the Old City, but we had no idea where we were.
Then we finally turned left. When the announcement came for Choroshei Barzel, Iron Potters Street, there were two stops to go. But you had to take care.
Once, as I stepped off the bus, a Wolt courier barreling around to the right slipped between the bus and the curb and almost ran me over. So many memories!
We were young. We were disoriented. Our Aliyah future lay spread out before us like Uncle Bernie on the chaise lounge at the 4th of July picnic.
Sometimes we took the 13 downtown, down Aza Street, then right on Agron Street to Mamilla, then left and up to King George, familiar from trips to Israel when we were teenagers.
And now the 13 would be gone! Vanished! No records, no monuments, nothing to validate all those early Aliyah memories. How could they do this, to Jerusalem and to us?
***
Very nice. But you came on Aliyah three years ago when you were already, shall we say, a vatik. Isn’t evoking lost youth a bit much?
Well, it seems like a long time ago. And sometimes simple things evoke complex memories. Proust had his madeleines. I had the 13 Bus.
Did you ever read Proust?
I tried, once, but I gave up on page three.
Uh-huh. And didn’t you tell me that you stopped taking the 13 to your ulpan before it finished, that you switched lines?
Well, when they opened up the 90, that bus took us where we wanted to go in half the time and without all the turns.
So if you adjusted to that, you can adjust to this. The 18 bus is going to cover a lot of the 13’s route. What’s a luckier number, 13 or 18?
I guess you’re right, but still…
As they say in Hebrew teraga, chill.
We learned that in ulpan. It’s nif’al!
Thanks, very helpful.
Maybe you’re right. I will try to chill. But since Kol Nidre is taken, I still want to memorialize the 13 Bus in music. For that I will channel the Immortal Bard.
Shakespeare?
No, Allan Sherman. Here goes….
We left Boston
Miss the chowdah!
Now the 13
Took a powdah
Here’s the 18!
Let’s go Gaga
Hevrat Egged kindly disregard this bloggah!
***
